What Most eCommerce Brands Get Wrong About Profitable Growth

Something you spend a lot of time thinking about, and I'm excited to come to AI in just a second, but starting kind of at the top, something you spend a lot of time thinking about, talking about, and are very, I guess, adamant about is profitability.

Why?

Ultimately, I think you have to focus on profit.

It's so easy to scale revenue.

Any business can grow $5 million if you spend $10 million in ads.

You could sell literally anything.

But the reality is for a company like Jordan Craig, which is fully bootstrapped, profit is what keeps the business running.

Positive cash flow.

And it's really a commitment to profit.

You can't just say you're profit-driven.

You have to commit to it.

It's...

Holding yourself accountable.

It's holding your vendors accountable.

It's everything.

We have one North Star.

And yes, everything goes into that.

Repeat purchase, raid, acquisition, COGS, CAC, everything.

I would say most companies don't understand.

Sometimes you have to take a step back.

You can make the same amount on Meta, Google, Snapchat, Pinterest, etc., Generally, you could pull back spend.

A lot of people are wasting spend and they're not focusing on incrementality.

And that I think is the most important thing is if I give anyone a channel, anyone a dollar, whatever channel it may be, whether that is a paid media channel, whether that's an agency, whether that's a data collector, if I give you a dollar, you better give me $2 back.

Right.

There's so many companies that, Meta's the perfect example, you give them a dollar, they'll say they made you two, three, four, eight dollars back, but the reality is maybe only a dollar fifty of that was incremental.